The Pitch Book: Dead Or Alive?

It used to be that if you asked most financial professionals what the single most important piece of sales collateral was, the answer would be the pitch book, of course. In the current era of tweets, email blasts, podcasts, and other media deliverables, has the old-fashioned deck of slides fallen by the wayside? I recently asked a number of financial colleagues from both the buy and sell sides to weigh in on this question. Their replies shed some interesting light on the topic.

YES... NO... MAYBE SO...

As most things in life go, the importance of pitch books in marketing is not a black and white issue. The responses I received to whether or not the pitch book is dead were fairly evenly split between no (alive) and yes (dead), and each side included the fund managers who create them and the investors and advisors who receive them. The graphic below summarizes the general arguments both in favor and against the pitch book's relevance in today's marketing efforts.

AN ARGUMENT FOR PITCHING THAT BOOK IN FAVOR OF OTHER COMMUNICATION FORMATS

Social media and other technological advances have played a major role in the way people both receive and exchange information. The variety, frequency, and typical length of information exchange has evolved dramatically over the past decade, with diverse formats and faster real-time delivery, while the content length of information has shrunk dramatically, to sound bites, memes, and tweets. This evolution has been so pervasive even within the financial community that a 20-page deck of slides seems archaic and quaint as a primary means of telling an investment story.

In 1964, Marshall McLuhan first coined the phrase, the medium is the message. "The content of any medium is always another medium," meaning some of the intent of a message is delivered via its format. This is even truer in 2018, as news, gossip, e......................

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This article was published in Opalesque's New Managers a top-down monthly analysis, news and research publication on the global emerging manager space.